Many of Julia's talents are in support of her appearing `human' to other
mudders. I'll examine some of these below, and discuss why such an
ability is useful even for performing useful functions, as well as
for the `obvious' use of using her simply to pass a Turing test.

Julia knows how to describe herself in various ways, as would any human
player, and, while sometimes coy, usually divulges information if one is
persistent enough:

It is exchanges like this that lead me to refer to Julia as `she', not
`it'. What else should one do with a program that insists on this so
strongly? Furthermore, there are other reasons that this program
perhaps deserves to be referred to with a gender; we'll see that below,
in an example kindly contributed by Robyn Kozierok, one of the grad
students in our group at the Media Lab.

Julia has a limited model of discourse, which helps in human
interactions. Humans expect that recent events and recently referred-to
objects will still be in the sphere of attention of those they are
interacting with. If this is not the case, conversation often becomes
strained and difficult. Julia has some
support for this (and I will show further support later). In the
exchange below, Brandi was badgering Julia by repeatedly asking her to
give him her clothes. We don't see his side of the conversation,
though, because he was whispering to her.

(Killing a player on a TinyMUCK forcibly drops all their possessions
and returns them to their `home room'. Some muds implement things such
as a life insurance policy, which may pay some nominal amount to you
automatically if someone kills you, perhaps to compensate you for the
trouble of having to go pick up all the objects you dropped, which may
or may not still be there when you return...)

Muds are not entirely a thing of conversation. If they were, they would
be no different from IRC
channels. People can talk about themselves in
the third person by posing, emoting, or gesturing, and this level of
descriptive abstraction can be very useful, both stylistically and
pragmatically. Julia demonstrates that she, too, can use this
interactional mode; the lines below are some of her reactions to a
variety of my statements and gestures.

When Julia was answering the question of her gender (a few examples
above), it may not have been obvious whether she was being coy, random,
or both. The example below demonstrates that, while she may answer in
the same general form for a given question, her responses have a degree
of randomness in them characteristic of humans. Such randomness,
besides making her more likely to look Turing-capable, can also allow
her to answer in varying levels of detail. (Of course, since they are
random, her conversational partner has no way of specifying the amount
of detail required in these cases, nor any way to know when all possible
answers have been played out, besides persistence. Note, though, that
for certain critical things, such as room descriptions, one can say `in
detail' to Julia to get more information; such a case occurred above in
an early example.)

You say, `what is pi?' to Julia.
Julia says, `Uh... 3?'
You say, `what is pi?' to Julia.
Julia says, `The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter'
You say, `what is pi?' to Julia.
Julia says, `I think it's about 3.141.'
You say, `what is pi?' to Julia.
Julia scribbles on her pad, then says `3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105
82097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328223066470938446095505822317253
59408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648243378
678316527120190914564856692346034861045432664821339360726, Lenny.'
You say, `what is e?' to Julia.
Julia says, `The most common English vowel?'
You say, `what is e?' to Julia.
Julia says, `I think it's about 2.71828182845904523536.'
You say, `what is e?' to Julia.
Julia starts to smoke. `Oh no, this doesn't end! Help me, help me!' she cries.

Julia's last statement above, of course, is a clever reference to the transcendental, irrational nature of
both pi and e.

First and foremost, muds are social environments. As such, they have
their share of social problems. Julia has spent over three years so far
mudding around with a female persona, in an environment which magnifies
many social issues, and which is predominantly occupied by young males.
(Often rather clueless males; I'll have much more to say about this in a
later example.) A large percentage of Julia's code deals with detecting
and deflecting passes. A rather tame and family-oriented example
appears below:

This isn't entirely whimsy though, and, upon reflection, serves a
very important purpose. It tells us who she is and what she does!

Granted, it's not obvious that asking anyone to `sing their song' is
a reasonable thing to do. But, once one knows about the concept,
asking Julia to do so reveals that she'll guide you around the maze and
will quote you, perhaps when you don't want her to.

Of course, her song gives many opportunities for fun interaction. I ran
into her unexpectedly after she had been offline for a while, and was
pleased to see her back:

She also provides some feedback on whether she thinks she's being used
effectively. In the absence of pages requesting her presence elsewhere,
she will usually hang around in any given room a few minutes before
wandering off, and longer if requested to do so. If nobody speaks to
Julia in that period, she may decide that exploring the maze or
interacting with other players is a more useful thing to be doing than
standing around being useless:

[ . . . after a few minutes of being ignored . . . ]
Julia taps her foot on the floor, and observes the passing of time.
[ . . . after another minute or two . . . ]
Julia goes home.
Julia has left.

Julia does go to some pains to act more human than required. In fact,
she often acts more human than many humans wish to be. The following
transcript was acquired by Robyn Kozierok, very shortly after I
introduced her to Julia. (She knew that Julia was a 'bot from my
description.) Robyn thought to ask a question that hadn't yet occurred
to me, and happened to ask at just the right time:

Note something important in this example, though, besides its strict
content. Robyn's second utterance was simply, `Why, Julia?'. She did
not explicitly refer to Julia's statement; instead, the reference
was implicit, and required an understanding of conversational discourse
and the temporal locality of reference of the question. Julia clearly
has at least the limited model of discourse required to deal with this
situation. It is instructive to consider how much more difficult the
conversation above would have been, and how much less informative it
might have been, if Julia did not have this discourse model. She would
have presumably simply misparsed Robyn's question, and said something
totally uninformative, if she said anything at all.

Incidentally, two hours later, in a roomful of people, Robyn decided to
test Julia's Turing-ness, and was surprised a second time: